Achieving communal self-sufficiency in food. Come. On.
A village on the western fringes of Hampshire is well on the way to becoming the first in England to defy the power of the supermarket by achieving communal self-sufficiency in food.
So at least says an article in last week’s Guardian.And to unreflective cheers of joy.
And, let me put this politely, it’s complete balderdash. Read the small print. There a co-op with two fields, total acreage unknown but the larger of them 15 acres. So let’s say 25 acres in all. Now if I remember right, you can just about feed a family of five off an acre if you dedicate it entirely to potatoes. Not a good strategy as the Irish potato famine made painfully clear. But a strategy.
Now the good folk of Martin, a village not far from where I grew up, are not subsisting on potatoes. And even if they did, five times twenty five equals 125 people. The author of the article mentions 164 households in Martin though he’s vague about whether this is now or in the past. I bet it’s more than that now. And it’s just downright impossible for 168 households to live off 25 acres in southern England.
Purged of hype, the author’s point is that Future Farms (as the co-op is called) is raising enough vegetables for the village (if everyone in the village bought these veg) and a a few chickens and pigs on the side, and good for them.
That’s not self sufficiency though, not even close. No cereals, so no bread or crackers or cakes or cookies. Very little meat. No sugar. No oils or fats. Not much in the way of fruits. Sorry, man doth not live by veggies alone.
OK, OK, why do I get so hot under the collar about this? Because it’s part of the great vegetablization of talk about food. Vegetables now reign. We are told to eat mainly vegetables. We are treated to stories of farmers who grow only vegetables. We hear how this village is defying the supermarkets turning the clock back to when the village was sustained by local farms and dairies (jeez, and when was that, pray?)
It’s a sloppy use of language to equate vegetables and food. It’s sloppy journalism in a newspaper with a great past. It misleads readers into thinking that all you need is a few acres of veggies and you can reverse modern farming and retailing. It suggests feeding people is easy if you plant a few rows of onions and cabbage. It’s not just balderdash, it’s dangerous balderdash.
Too bad, because a market garden is a good thing.
“That’s not self sufficiency though, not even close. No cereals, so no bread or crackers or cakes or cookies. Very little meat. No sugar. No oils or fats. Not much in the way of fruits. Sorry, man doth not live by veggies alone.”
OMG. That sounds like the Korean diet before industrialization. We had rice, lots of sea salt and small seafood though. Sugar and oils or fats were scarce. Meat was a luxury. Koreans survived, but were definitely smaller people with shorter lifespans.
I often think about why older Koreans can get so emotional about the trinity of the traditional Korean table: rice, kimchi and dwenjang (miso type fermented bean paste) soup. It was the food of sustenance. And the famous kimchi that was buried in the ground during the winter, had to sustain families through bitter cold winter months (3-4 months before fresh vegetables grew again). Ask any Korean (even people from the former yangbang or aristocratic class) about winters before industrialization. They can get quite emotional. The memories of scarcity and freezing cold temperatures are just underneath the surface.
Conversely, I often wonder how many generations it takes to adapt to industrialization. Extraordinarily fast. I’m 40, so Korea’s rapid industrialization. But if you talk to someone who is about 10 years younger, they really don’t have the same sense of rapid change that I do. A bit younger and they have entered the nostalgia phase of an industrialized culture. They buy products touting “the taste of the old days”; a high end rice cake manufacturer’s logo is a neatly groomed Korean grandmother with a traditional chignon and dress; and pricey cosmetics use nostalgic language and Korean ethnomedicine ingredients as marketing tools.
Throughout the 1970s-mid-1990s whenever I went back to visit, there was a clear rush to move forward, to embrace progress and modernization as the only goals. There was some embarrassment about a more “backwards” past. And, now this nostalgia for “the old days”. Quite remarkable.
Extraordinarily quick. Although the US is a bit of an exception, having always had plentiful food, Europe was very tight through the mid 20th century, not helped by two major wars. Your children will be have no visceral sense of this. Just stories.
There is an increasing emphasis in the press/public perception that eating vegetables is the only ethical way of eating. Five years ago I knew many vegetarians that were going back to eating meat, now I am observing the opposite trend.
I don’t get the ethical treatment of animals as a viable reason for giving up meat. Surely by giving up eating ethically raised meat, you are reducing this market and increasing the likelihood of meat being produced in an industrialized (= unethical) manner?
Agreed with all that Adam. But even if you are a vegetarian, the calorie/population ratio of the Martin market gardens doesn’t work out. Vegetarians if anything need more creals, more roots, more beans because they are not getting the high calories of meat and fat.
Cheers! Rachel, well said!
…but I fear that you are preaching to the choir.
… but maybe if people just keep saying it, the word will get out.
We can only hope. Vegetables are important, no doubt about it, but cereals have been the basis of the human diet for the past 10-20,000 years and I see no sign that that is going to change.
here’s a quote from a novel that sums up your idea:
“No one carried a pound of superfluous flesh, in spite of the vast quantities of starchy food. They expended every ounce they ate in work… Vegetables and fruit were eaten because they were good for you, but it was the bread, potatoes, meat and floury puddings which staved off exhaustion.” (The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough)
Maria, Hadn’t remembered that quote but it’s a good one. Trying to remember the time period in which the Thorn Birds was set. Because the idea that vegetables are good for you is really pretty recent, 1930s one, and the current glorification of them really in the last ten or twenty years.
As much as I love vegetables – growing, reading about them and even trying to breed them – there’s no way (other than post potato arrival) that they’ve made a significant contribution to our diet in terms that hard working people can understand – calories. I’ve done a fair amount of quite vigorous manual labour on occasion and I’ve never found myself craving salads, not unless smothered in gloriously fatty mayonnaise. I suspect that the current superabundance of calories has led to an attendant interest in phytonutrients, superfoods and romanticised versions of peasant diets and wild food foraging. I enjoy eating nettles and wild garlic and they’re probably very good for me, but in terms of meeting my daily energy budget, they’re peripheral.
Peripheral vegetables. I like that. And you are breeding vegetables in Cornwall. Have to follow what you are up to there.
How long is the growing season in Martin?
“It suggests feeding people is easy if you plant a few rows of onions and cabbage. It’s not just balderdash, it’s dangerous balderdash.”
They’ll probably have to make sauerkraut or kimchi out of the cabbage during the winter. Where will they get the salt?
If you put a sack of potatoes in a cool place it will last the winter. And you can cut cabbage all winter. It’s not growing–the growing season is from about April to October–but it’s OK.
I agree with your outrage, however, I wonder why things are all or nothing, like this. The writer was indeed very sloppy and pandered to the current “fad” that everything from the past (or not even from the real past…from what I call the Disney Past) was good and everything supermarket was bad. This is silly think. Lovely if more of the Martin folk are eating more local vegetables, esp. on a co-op basis, however, why is this supposed to be some kind of panacea? Of course we need oils–from elsewhere, of course we need fat and protein–from more than a couple of foraging pigs, of course we need cereals–and modern agriculture does a bang-up job of supplying those in quantities neverbefore dreamed of–when they aren’t going to ethanol production. Why not a happy blend of both? Olive oil from Spain, coffee from Ecuador, wheat from Canada (all shipped by water, the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to ship goods) and fresh veg from down the road?
Giudi, I couldn’t agree more. Comparative advantage is a powerful argument. Thanks for commenting.
Thank you! I find it amazing how people somehow have lost the idea of history and that our food sources have evolved to fulfill dietary needs. The “romance with the vegetable” is really an a-historical fantasy…..I’m glad there are people like you who take the time to set the (very historical and evidence based) record straight.
“Why not a happy blend of both? Olive oil from Spain, coffee from Ecuador, wheat from Canada (all shipped by water, the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to ship goods) and fresh veg from down the road?”
That’s pretty much what I see in pantries when I visit friends who talk a lot about “sustainable” eating. Slow Food chapters seem to organize a lot of dining out events too. They seem utterly clueless about how the vast majority of restaurant food is made. I don’t understand why these people don’t see the contradictions between what they claim and what they do.
Just another example of the sensationalist MSM “journalists” making themselves more and more irrelevant as each day passes.
What’s an MSM journalist, to be a bit thick about this.
Hi Rachel – From what I understand, MSM – “Mainstream Media”
Well, I’d never have figured that one out on my own Kirk. Thanks.
Rachel,
Just to pile on. Thank you for this. I love your response and wholeheartedly agree. When I read the article I also thought it was utterly ridiculous for all the reasons you note. However, just to add some other perspective: The educated intellectuals can respond with facts about the ludicrous reporting and idealism–all true, and talk amongst themselves. But how to accept and address the honest longings and romanticism that the public has? It seems legitimate because of all the garbage food that our wealth has given us, obesity in children, etc. People, understandably, long for a sense of connection to their past, and this is why they love Michael Pollan because he enobles the past. How to provide a more balanced accurate historical view ordinary people?
Thanks for that Laura. It’s a problem that really comes home to me when I am in the States where the nostalgia seems to have been growing in intensity since the folk movements of the late nineteenth century. I agree with you that finding an answer is crucial if we are to move ahead. And most of the attempts don’t seem to help much. I want to try to begin circling round this later this week via parks and nature which I’ve been thinking about a lot in my recent transition from Mexico to the US. More soon.